Late follow-ups are better than no follow-ups

I get at least around 300 e-mails a day. Most of the e-mails are spam, while the rest are not. Some e-mails require immediate response, while many do not require any response. In my view, you should try to follow-up to each and every e-mail from your readers that may warrant even the slightest of responses. Even if you are already late in following-up to something, you should go ahead and follow-up to your readers to make sure you do not keep anyone waiting. If you keep your readers waiting for your responses on purpose without any good reason, you are not appreciating them.

Replying to readers late is better than never replying

E-mails should be treated with as much respect as comments, if not more. Courtesy, manners and the length of your e-mails are topics that can be covered in another post. For now, I only want to stress on the importance of following-up to all e-mails even if your responses are way too late. If you must wait before writing a response e-mail so that you can come up with a better reply, awesome! Otherwise, if you wait before replying to e-mails simply because you are bored or want to watch movies all day, you should let your users know the amount of time it takes for you to reply to any e-mails. The longer you keep someone waiting in the dark for your response, the less appreciative you appear to people.

Following-up to e-mails shows that you care

Following-up to an e-mail, even if your follow-up is late, shows that you appreciate your reader taking the time to e-mail you, and it also shows the other person that you are willing to acknowledge that you kept them waiting.

Almost every week I respond to e-mails that I have somehow missed, even if they are weeks or months old. Most of the time, I get responses that actually tell me how someone was waiting for my response, or how someone is happy that I took the time to acknowledge that because of my overlooking some e-mail by accident, someone waited for a while for my reply. Those people always respect me more, since they know that I respect them a lot because they took the time to respond to me. If I act snobbish like a stereotypical blogger who replies to e-mails only when he/she feels like it, I am simply a snobbishly selfish person and probably nothing more. Since I always try to respect people by responding to all e-mails, even if I am quite late in my responses, people realize that I am trying to communicate with them and build good and honest bonds. That is a good thing.

So go ahead, open your e-mail client and find all the e-mails that warrant a response and the e-mails you never responded to. Responding to e-mails and apologizing to your readers for making them wait can do wonders.

Other RA Project Articles

• WP From the Vault (0)
• Know more about your current readers (1)
• Things to Avoid: What Makes Me Nervous When Reading Your Blog (18)
• Peeve Week 3 Update (0)
• Treat online readers the same as you would offline people (2)

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